Tarantino Is So Upset His Script Leaked He Won't Make the Movie

Someone betrayed Quentin Tarantino's trust and now he's scrapping his next movie.

It's a bizarre story that broke last night. After learning that his script for his would-be next movie, The Hateful Eight, was leaked, Tarantino called up Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. to explain that he would not actually be making the film next. He said: "I’m very, very depressed. I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn’t mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it’s gotten out today.”

Tarantino is placing the blame on CAA, the agency that represents Bruce Dern, one of the three actors to whom Tarantino gave the script. Fleming reported that a source at CAA "vehemently denied" the agency was the source of the leak, but that how it actually got out is an "unsolvable breach." (Later on, Tarantino also speculates that it could be Michael Madsen's agent.)

Tarantino now says he will work on another project, one in which Dern will likely still have a part. Tarantino's problem is not that the script got out, but that the script got out so early. "I like the fact that people like my shit, and that they go out of their way to find it and read it," he told Fleming. "But I gave it to six motherfucking people! Starting this week, I’ll be setting meetings with publishers."

Script leaks are a fact of life when it comes to highly anticipated films. As actresses were dropping out of Gravity like flies in 2010, a 2009 version of the script leaked and was criticized on the Internet. More recently, there were reports that the X-Men: Days of Future Past script leaked. The Tarantino situation looks more like the Gravity situation wherein the product leaked is in such an early stage it almost seems worthless to evaluate it.

Apparently there will be another Tarantino movie. "The idea was, I was going to write two scripts," he told Fleming. "I wasn’t going to shoot the Western until next winter, and I have been full of piss and vinegar about the other one. So now I’ll do that one." The Wrap already has rumors about that one. The publication "has heard that Tarantino has been considering a prison movie of sorts and has immersed himself in the details of the Robert Blake case."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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